Sunday Music: Today’s music inspires Blondie founder Chris Stein

It’s a typical complaint of most older people — they just don’t like or understand the music of their children or grandchildren. But Chris Stein, founder and lead guitarist of the ’70s and ’80s new wave...

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By
Susan McDonald
Posted Oct. 6, 2013 @ 12:01 am

It’s a typical complaint of most older people — they just don’t like or understand the music of their children or grandchildren.

But Chris Stein, founder and lead guitarist of the ’70s and ’80s new wave band Blondie, isn’t most older people. Although in his 60s, Stein says he’s inspired by the music of today. Inspired to continue coming up with new music and to continue to tour and play it.

Blondie, which skyrocketed to success in the late 1970s with such pop-punk hits as “Call Me,” “One Way or Another” and “Heart of Glass,” is currently on tour and although Stein says the lifestyle drains him more than it used to, even when touring involved drug-laced parties and the related hangovers, he still loves it.

“There’s a little bit of the burnout factor here,” he says in a phone interview during a stop in Ohio. “You play, get on the bus, drive to a new city, sleep a few hours on the bus, get into another hotel, sleep a few more hours.”

The reason he does it — and the reason Blondie started touring and creating new music again in the late 1990s — is for the love of music.

“I like music and what’s going on in modern pop music,” he says simply. “It’s all becoming dance music and it’s consciously physical.

“That Gotye song ‘Somebody that I Used to Know’ — I love it,” says Stein about the song by the Belgian-Australian singer-songwriter. “I would be driving and play that song 15 times in a row. It’s a great song with a lot going on below the surface.”

Stein, who met Blondie lead singer Debbie Harry while playing Manhattan clubs in the 1970s, notes that while albums might come back in musical fashion someday, today’s focus is on the one song that takes off. It’s a challenge for him and Harry, who writes the lyrics for his music, to craft that single exciting song for the band.

He cites songs like “Wake Me Up” by Avicii as one of those creative combinations of sound and lyrics that he admires.

“It’s like Mumford and Sons meets Richie Havens in a disco. It’s so clever!” he muses.

The pace is much slower than back in Blondie’s earlier days, but Stein isn’t complaining. The band made some mistakes that caused them to break up for a bit after four years, but he calls regret “a drag” that he doesn’t give into. Instead, he considers the present. The business has gotten slicker and more organized when it comes to touring, and even collaborations between him and Harry are largely electronic.

“I work up something and then I send it over to her,” he says.

Their latest work — some of which is featured with a blend of “stuff people want to hear” and covers in their concerts — has been for the band’s 10th album, “Ghosts of Download,” due in January. A separate release of rerecordings of early songs will follow soon after. The new stuff, Stein says, is more dance oriented with heavy Latin influence, even though he hesitates to go too much in one direction after being criticized for having too much of a reggae sound on the last album in 2011.

“Ghosts of Download” will feature songs recorded with the Argentine group Systema Solar and Beth Ditto from the band Gossip.

“We’ve even worked on covering ‘Relax’ by Frankie Goes to Hollywood as a ballad. It’s six minutes long and very abstract, but it’s great,” Stein says.